Free Web NovelEmbers drifted down from the sky, like a gray snowfall.
The dust clouds were stained a dark crimson by the light seeping in from beyond the horizon, and the horns of a pursuing legion sounded in the distance, gradually growing faint and indistinct.
Two great dragons hovered in the high air between desolation and clamor.
One was dark, like cooled lava, the other a jade green as a deep pool.
The green dragon Cerora listened to Garoth’s words, a flash of realization crossing her eyes. She showed no surprise, only nodded slightly.
“I was thinking you wouldn’t let him get away so easily.”
Cerora continued, “That chrome dragon bared his teeth at you on the battlefield and then escaped after spouting some vicious line. With your personality, how could you possibly let a Mandate great dragon slip from your claws? Especially when he’s already been badly wounded. You should chase him down and kill him. You can’t leave such a loose end to fester.”
She paused and cocked her head.
Garoth’s primary head turned a little, his gaze settling on the green dragon.
“My goal is not to kill him.”
“What?”
The green dragon’s eyes widened in surprise.
Then she stared at Garoth for several long breaths. A puzzled glint crossed her green vertical pupils, then shifted into sudden comprehension.
“You want to capture him alive?”
She probed.
Garoth nodded. “Yes. Capture alive, then tame him.”
As he spoke, one of his subheads rotated slightly, his gaze piercing the heavy dust clouds and the distance, taking in the fleeing dark-silver silhouette in full.
Garoth smiled coldly.
Did someone offend the great Scarlet Emperor and still try to run?
Either decapitate him or make him a dog.
Opposite him, Cerora tilted her head as if to confirm she’d heard correctly.
“Capture a Mandate great dragon alive?”
“Oh, my dear Garoth, you should know what that implies. Capturing him alive is far harder than killing him.”
“I know.”
Garoth said, “It’s difficult. But it’s not a must-do. It’s an attempt.”
“If it fails, if he resists too fiercely, or if the cost of capture outweighs the benefit... then kill him. I will not risk lives to tame a mad dragon.”
Cerora nodded, acknowledging the logic.
“But why do you want to tame him?”
A puzzled expression crossed her face.
“That’s what he would do, Garbel.”
“You are not the kind who likes collecting rare creatures as trophies, gathering all dragon types under your retinue to satisfy some fetish, nor do you need to conquer a mad dragon to prove your authority. A king like you doesn’t need that.”
“And you have no emotional ties to Claudia.”
“Except for him biting you a few times and you nearly killing him, today was your first meeting.”
“What could he possibly bring you?”
Garoth was silent for a few seconds.
Dust swam in his eyes; he looked thoughtful as he slowly spoke, “Because I don’t want to slaughter too many dragons.”
“Especially those that have reached the Mandate tier.”
Hearing that, the green dragon showed genuine surprise.
She circled Garoth once, scrutinizing him from head to tail and back again, as if looking at someone she had never truly known.
“Could it be that...”
She teased, “you’re actually a dragon supremacist? If so, Garoth, you hide it well—this is the first time I’ve noticed it.”
“I am not.”
Garoth shook his head.
“I have no innate mission toward the dragonkind’s fate.”
“I will not selflessly aid another dragon simply because it is of my kind, nor will I sacrifice my interests for the greater good of dragons.”
Cerora blinked. “Then why do you care?”
“Because I don’t care for dragonkind as a whole, but I care about how it affects me.”
Garoth turned his head to meet the green dragon’s gaze.
“Whether dragonkind is strong or weak, glorious or fallen, it has no direct stakes for me.”
“I will not fight for dragon glory, nor sacrifice myself for dragon revival, nor take unnecessary risks for any racial cause.”
“However, as one of the great dragons, the overall strength of dragonkind is intimately linked to me.”
“This is not about racial sentiment, but a chain reaction that exists objectively—whether I wish it or not.”
Garoth stared at Cerora and unburdened his thoughts.
“For instance, if I am powerful, my influence will radiate to the dragons.”
“Other dragons will look up to me, emulate me, use me as a benchmark. This influence seeps in and is inevitable, like a sun’s light illuminating surrounding planets regardless of whether the sun cares about them.”
“When other races measure dragon strength, they count me in.”
“When they see the Red Emperor occupying Atlan, founding his own kingdom, defeating enemy after enemy, growing stronger, they will judge dragonkind as a force to be reckoned with. That perception affects their decisions and how they treat other dragons.”
He paused; his voice deepened.
“The reverse is true as well.”
“If dragonkind weakens, that weakness radiates to me, bringing various troubles.”
“Other races will scorn dragons and hunt them more fiercely.”
“When dragonkind declines overall, every dragon becomes a target, including me. Troubles will arrive continuously, whether I want to face them or not.”
“Then, facing even the strongest dragons, they will no longer see them as invincible.”
Garoth did not care whether dragons were strong or weak.
But before he could reach a point where their condition didn’t matter to him, he needed, within his power, to keep dragonkind reasonably strong so his living environment would be easier.
This was the conclusion of his long reflection.
Cerora listened quietly.
The astonishment in her eyes slowly faded, replaced by contemplation.
“So you don’t care about Claudia himself,” she said slowly, “but about what he represents as a Mandate great dragon... the weight?”
“You could put it that way.”
Garoth nodded slightly.
“In Bernardo, Mandate great dragons are not numerous.”
“Each Mandate great dragon, regardless of faction, alignment, or order, adds weight to dragonkind’s overall influence.”
“When other races calculate dragon strength, they factor in every Mandate great dragon.”
“Each Mandate dragon lost chips away a layer of dragon influence, weakening dragonkind’s standing in Bernardo.”
“And that weakening will eventually propagate to me.”
“Maybe a force that once dared not challenge me will suddenly get the courage, or an empire that has conflicts with me will have one less reason to hesitate.”
“Whatever the case, I don’t want it.”
Cerora agreed and nodded deeply.
“I didn’t expect you to think so far ahead.”
“To be honest, I never viewed it from this angle. Maybe because I haven’t stood where you stand. Now you truly must consider such things.”
“Then...”
The green dragon’s tail rose, the tip curling slightly. Her whole demeanor shifted from lazy conversation to the focused attentiveness before a hunt.
“I will go with you, to hunt and capture this Mandate great dragon.”
Garoth looked at her. “Are you sure? His counterattack will be crazed.”
Cerora’s mouth split into a grin, revealing sharp fangs. “Capturing a Mandate great dragon—if we pull it off, it will be one of the wildest hunts in Arotala’s history.”
“How could I miss it?”
Excitement glittered in her eyes.
“In a straight-up fight, I can’t match a Mandate great dragon, that’s true. But if I only assist, I am fully capable. I have means to affect his Mandate even without entering his line of sight.”
“You break his claws and fangs, I shatter his will.”
“One in the open, one from the dark—he won’t escape.”
Garoth nodded.
“Let’s go,” he said. “The prey is running; we don’t have much time to waste.”
His dark wings unfurled violently.
The massive body in Ember-Annihilating Form surged upward, the wing tips cutting air with a low, roaring hiss.
Garoth sped off in a direction, his form vanishing at the edge of the dust cloud, Cerora close on his tail, blending into the gray.
They streaked one after the other like twin meteors across the sky.
Sea breezes, spiked with salt, lashed against the rocks.
Above waters far from the continental shelf, a dark-silver silhouette cut through the low-hanging clouds.
Each beat of Claudia’s wings tore at his wounds, blood half-coagulated trickling from the gaps between scales.
Cold.
Hunger.
Pain.
Three sensations braided within him.
But Claudia was used to them.
Cold had been his companion since birth, hunger an abyss he could never fill, and pain the loyal hound of his long life that never betrayed him.
They tore at him and tormented him, but they also kept him awake.
As long as he could feel them, it meant he was still alive.
On the skyline behind him, the dust cloud’s dark crimson faded, replaced by a clearing gray-blue.
He had flown away from the battlefield.
The Scarlet Emperor Cangxing, Garoth Ignas.
Claudia chewed on the name in his mind.
He remembered the taste of those bites, but what lingered more was not the bite itself but the pain.
When struck squarely by the opposing dragon breath, he had almost died.
The burning penetrated every defense, searing into bone.
His organs felt boiled, his blood ablaze. If not for a final desperate devour—consuming an orc of Mandate rank and using that life force to patch his shredded body—he would not have escaped.
As for switching sides in the heat of battle:
He bore no guilt about it.
It had always been mutual exploitation.
You eat me, I eat you.
The world worked that way.
The strong devoured the weak, the clever devoured the foolish. There was no right or wrong, only survival or death; some consumption was more civilized, his manner of eating was directly brutal.
The smell of sea wind grew stronger.
Salty, fishy, with algae and rotting seagrass, and an endless otherness.
Claudia looked down.
Beneath him the land had narrowed into a thin coastline; beyond it lay an endless gray-blue expanse. The sea rolled below, lead-gray waves frothing white caps.
He did not hesitate and dove.
He skimmed the sea surface for roughly half an hour until the shoreline completely disappeared behind him and only water and sky remained, then he folded his wings and plunged into the ocean.
Light vanished quickly.
From the shallow green to the deep navy and then to absolute black, water pressure squeezed his body from all sides, compressing his wounds and amplifying the pain.
Claudia paid it no mind.
He simply inhaled and drank the blood leaking from his body, swallowing it so it wouldn’t be wasted.
He continued to sink.
Soon, a fissure hidden under silt entered his perception.
It lay deep in the folds of the seabed mountain range, narrow and winding.
The entrance barely allowed him to squeeze through, then the interior opened up.
It was a domed cavern hollowed by the sea.
The cave walls were smooth, covered with the bleached coral skeletons that had never seen sunlight; the corals were long dead, leaving gray-white branches jutting from the rock like dead limbs.
Claudia finally stopped in the deepest corner of the cavern.
Here, several cracks ran from the dome to the sidewalls like claw marks of a giant beast—marks he had left before.
The chrome dragon used Transformation, his body beginning to contract.
Quickly, a hulking Mandate dragon vanished.
In its place curled a hatchling-sized figure tucked into a rock crevice.
The scales dulled from dark silver to a pale, whitish-silver, making him look small, fragile, borderline pitiful.
Then Claudia buried his head between his forelimbs.
He bent his neck to the extreme, his lower jaw pressed to his chest, chin on his forearm, tail curled around his body with the tip almost touching his snout. His wings folded like two great leaves covering his sides, shielding his exposed wounds.
He kept this strange posture and began to sleep.
No dragon bestiary would record such a pose.
No normal great dragon would sleep this way.
Bending the neck to the extreme and tucking in all limbs looked twisted and painful.
For a dragon’s anatomy, this position couldn’t be comfortable; it would cause breathing difficulties, poor circulation, and stiffen muscles.
But Claudia had grown accustomed to it.
Only like this could he fall into a sliver of secure sleep.
This posture made him feel hidden, tucked into a shell, momentarily withdrawn from the world.
Claudia’s consciousness blurred.
The wounds still stung and his stomach convulsed in spasms, as if something wriggled inside. Compared to the hungers he had known before, this was nothing.
In the haze, his thoughts began to fragment.
Boundaries between memory and reality dissolved; he felt himself falling, moving upstream along the river of time, passing through years marked by blood and fire, back to the beginning.
Back to that cage.
Or rather, back to the only nightmare of his life.
Claudia opened his eyes and saw a line of alloy bars.
They stood before him, one by one, their silver surfaces etched with dense runes.
On the other side lay a stone floor also covered in a web of runes, faint blue light flowing in their grooves like countless luminous insects crawling across the ground.
He lay on the floor.
His body was tiny.
So small he could curl into a corner of the cage, his limbs thin as dried branches, skin dangling over bones, a thin layer of scales over them. His belly pressed to his spine, each rib protruding clearly.
Claudia looked down and saw his abdomen caved in.
It was hollowed out, as if someone had pulled his organs from within, leaving only skin. He could almost feel his spine through the abdominal skin—each segment hard and unyielding.
Hungry.
He opened his mouth to make a sound.
Only a rasp of air escaped his throat; it had long been since he’d drunk water; his vocal cords were cracked.
“It’s already the thirteenth year.”
A voice came.
Boots struck the stone floor with crisp sound, step after step, and then a pair of leather-clad feet appeared outside the bars.
Claudia lifted his head.
He saw an elf’s face.
Pale skin, pointed ears, golden hair tied in a ponytail, eyes of a light amber with no malice, no emotion.
“What a miraculous creature.”
The elf said with a tone of admiration.
“More than a decade without food or water and still alive, and it seems not yet at its limit.”
The elf pulled a notebook from his waist, flipped it open, and with a thin pen began to record.
At the same time, the runes on the cage glowed and an arc of electricity leapt out, striking Claudia’s body.
He twitched.
The current tore through his muscles, forcing those shriveled fibers to contract. His limbs jolted on the ground like a fish thrown ashore, then fell back.
Not because the pain was absent.
But because he had no strength left to respond beyond that. His body was too weak; even pain could only be endured silently—no energy left to struggle or roar.
The elf noted something into the book.
Then another arc of electricity.
Then fire.
Then cold.
Finally a blade.
Claudia was secured.
Metal rings held his limbs, stretching him to four directions; his body was forced straight, his abdomen fully exposed. He felt the cut open—blade slicing from chest to belly, skin peeled aside.
But he had no other reaction.
Only a numb posture, eyes half-open with dilated pupils, staring at the rune lamp on the ceiling.
He didn’t know how long he lay cut open.
Perhaps minutes, perhaps hours; time had no meaning in that cage.
Days later.
A series of experiments ended for a time.
Footsteps gradually receded until completely gone, then the sound of doors closing, then silence.
Claudia lay in the cage, eyes half-open, pupils vacant like a body not yet fully dead, his consciousness drifting between clarity and stupor.
Sometimes he could sense time passing; sometimes he could not.
But he remembered hunger.
An ever-present gnawing hunger.
Hunger did not kill him but brought unbearable torment.
His stomach felt like a crumpled paper bundle, every motion triggering sharp pain, as if something tore at his stomach lining. The pain spread through his abdomen to his limbs and concentrated at the crown of his head until his whole body screamed.
But pain was not the worst.
The worst was the hollowness.
As if something inside had been sucked out, leaving a hole that could never be filled.
He tried eating his own skin.
The charred flakes from his wounds, burned by the arcs, he rolled with his tongue, chewed and swallowed.
He felt nothing.
They were too little.
He licked his own bodily fluids.
Those clear, sticky exudates from his frostbitten hind legs—salty, bitter, metallic.
It at least moistened his throat and stopped his tongue from sticking to the palate.
He even ate his own feces—
Little, dry, wax-like.
Days passed.
Claudia stopped counting time.
He lost sense of it.
When awake, he would stare for days at the darkness beyond the cage.
The dark seemed alive, slowly writhing under his gaze, changing shapes—sometimes strange faces, sometimes twisted shadows.
He would suddenly lapse into sleep and wake with new wounds, with no sense of when he had been experimented upon again.
He felt as if he was already dead.
Only occasionally did his stomach twitch.
Then spasms of pain jerked him from a half-dead state, briefly reminding him he was alive.
Thus he reached the eighteenth year.
Change came on an ordinary morning.
Claudia felt a tremendous impact from overhead.
The ground trembled, dust fell from the ceiling, then the sound of flames, followed by a silence—an extraordinarily long silence.
Claudia lay in the cage waiting for a very long time.
One day, two days, three days... he was unsure.
His sense of time was completely broken.
After that, the doors that used to open periodically never opened again; the footsteps never returned.
The rune lamps in the laboratory dimmed.
The formation lacked maintenance; energy leakage outpaced replenishment. The faint blue light grew dimmer day by day until one day it went out entirely.
In the dark.
Claudia didn’t know how long he waited.
He simply lay there, listening to his heartbeat.
But hunger did not disappear.
After some fitful unconsciousness he realized, somehow, he had bitten through the chains.
Maybe the chains had rusted, maybe the enchantments on them had lost power, maybe his teeth were still sharp enough.
Yes, his fangs were naturally sharp, sharper than other chrome dragons.
That was the only part of him that had not fully degenerated from starvation.
When Claudia crawled out of the dungeon he found himself in the depths of a dense jungle.
Moonlight filtered through leaves, casting mottled silver patches on the ground. The air smelled of humus and nocturnal blooms; distant treetops echoed with the calls of night birds.
Free.
The thought drifted through his mind.
And then?
Claudia’s body left his mind no time to ponder.
Instinct bent him down and he began to gnaw the earth.
Dirt, roots, rotting leaves, unknown plant tubers.
A small sharp stone embedded in the soil sliced his tongue; his mouth filled with mud and blood.
But he did not stop.
He could not stop.
The gnawing in his stomach turned into a tearing frenzy, like a starved beast finally freed, clawing at his stomach walls and ripping at his intestines with teeth.
Eat!
Eat anything!
Eat everything that could fit in his mouth!
Fill the stomach, stuff the void, if only briefly—let that cursed hunger pause!
What followed is fuzzy in Claudia’s memory.
He only knew he kept eating.
Days passed.
He ate soil, roots, moss, small animals, insects, snakes, birds… his body expanded at a nearly mad pace; once shriveled flesh puffed out.
He gradually resumed the physique appropriate to his age.
No longer the emaciated little thing in the cage, he grew larger and stronger—stronger than many dragons of his peer group.
Yet he still felt hungry.
Always hungry.
Only when he opened his jaws, clamped prey in his fangs, felt flesh tear and warm blood flood his throat, would the hollow hunger briefly recede.
Just a moment.
Then it returned, stronger than before.
Frequent predation brought more fights.
More fights brought more wounds; more wounds made him more irritable and hungry; more hunger made him lose control more easily; more loss of control dragged him into conflicts more often. More conflict made him stronger; strength made him believe violence was the only solution.
A vicious cycle.
Nine Lives of Fortune.
Claudia lost count of how many near-deaths he’d endured.
But each time, he survived.
When he finally stood firmly and carved out an ecological niche among Bernardo’s dragons, he was no longer the little dragon curled in a cage waiting to die.
He was the Deep Freeze Tyrant.
Ancient Chrome Dragon, Claudia.
A powerful evil dragon that sent most creatures fleeing at the mere scent of him.
But what he truly desired had never been attained.
He wanted, once, to be truly full.
Just once.
.......
Deep within a heavy dream,
Claudia relived his wandering life of hunger and killing, dreaming he climbed step by step to the top of the food chain.
At the very end, he dreamt of being grievously wounded by the Scarlet Emperor Cangxing.
He dreamed of curling up in a dark ocean fissure, wounds aching, stomach empty, body chilled.
Dream and reality began to overlap.
At that moment, the pitch-black seawater was suddenly lit.
The light was dark crimson, hot, slicing through the water pressure and dyeing the cavern like molten magma.
Half-awake, Claudia’s eyes half-opened.
He perceived a familiar figure.
The Scarlet Emperor Cangxing.
The great dragon that had just nearly finished him hovered in the deep water. Burning eyes stared through the churning sea at him.
The dragon’s massive claws lifted high.
Between the two claws condensed a dragonqi bomb compressed to the extreme, like a sun on the verge of eruption; its dark-red glow illuminated the surrounding seawater.
The hatchling glanced at the “sun” with contempt.
Groggy and half-asleep, he rolled from his side to lie on his back, belly up, limbs splayed like a dead fish sunning its belly.
I admit you’re impressive—you even chased me into my dream—but how can you hurt me in a dream?
Come at me with everything you’ve got.
Only a cowardly dragon would choose to dodge.
